Art: Matisse The Color of Genius

Sometimes an exhibition will define the work of a major artist for a whole generation. So with the Museum of Modern Art's Picasso retrospective in 1980. Now New York City's MOMA has done it again, with "Henri Matisse: A Retrospective" (through Jan. 12), devoting most of its space to an enormous survey of Matisse's paintings, drawings, collages and sculpture curated by art historian John Elderfield.

The last comparable Matisse show was organized in 1970 by Pierre Schneider in Paris, to mark the artist's centenary. It contained 250 works, and its catalog weighed 2 lbs. It seemed, at the time, exhaustive. This one has rather more than 400 works, and its catalog tips the kitchen scales at 5 lbs. 7 oz., outweighing even MOMA's Picasso catalog by 11 oz. It isn't a show to approach casually, even if the coming box-office jam allowed it. But Elderfield's panorama of Matisse's achievement is so exhilarating, so full of rapturous encounters with one of the grandest pictorial sensibilities ever to pick up a brush, so steady in its narrative line and -- not incidentally -- so sensitively hung, that even if you go in with a certain foreboding, you come out walking on air and longing to start right over again.

Only MOMA's resources -- its own collection, Elderfield's connoisseurship and the accumulated borrowing power that is the peaceable blackmail of the museum world -- could have produced this show. Its essential component, never seen in such depth outside Russia before, is the paintings bought from Matisse's studio 80 years ago by those two inspired and obsessed collectors, Ivan Morosov and Sergei Shchukin, now divided between the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

Starting two decades later, MOMA also plunged heavily on Matisse; Alfred * Barr's belief in Matisse's supreme importance to modernism, at a time when the artist was widely considered to be a decorator (albeit a great one), gave New York City a collection of incomparable breadth. Some key paintings are absent, chiefly the crucial Luxe, Calme et Volupte, 1904-05. But there are not many holes in this tapestry, and given the cost of insurance and owners' growing reluctance to expose artworks to the risk of travel, it may be that no museum will ever be able to mount such a show again.

Matisse, paladin of modernism, is a long way from us now. Almost a generation older than Picasso, his counterpart, he was born in 1869, the year the Suez Canal opened and Gustave Flaubert published L'Education Sentimentale. Everything that looked modern in Matisse's environment is now ancient, from the gas buggies that were just coming onto the streets of Paris when he was a student in Gustave Moreau's atelier to the Vichy politicians who ran France during the Nazi occupation as he painted in Vence.